Hello everyone,

I would like to start doing some lower level development with Ruby, so
I started by building Ruby 1.8.5 under windows using Visual-C 8.

That went smoothly, so my first test after installing Ruby was to
install Gems, so that I could add some packages I need.  That also
seemed to work, until I tried running "gem".

Any invocation of gem returns the following errors:

C:/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in
`gem_original_require': no such file to load -- zlib (LoadError)
        from
C:/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in
`require'
        from C:/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/package.rb:9
        from
C:/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in
`gem_original_require'
        from
C:/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in
`require'
        from C:/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/builder.rb:7
        from
C:/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in
`gem_original_require'
        from
C:/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in
`require'
        from C:/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:93:in
`manage_gems'

        from C:/usr/local/bin/gem:10

I tried uncommenting zlib in ruby-1.8.5/ext/Setup.nt and rebuilding
from scratch (after "nmake clean"), but that made no difference, and I
could see no sign that zlib was actually built.

What step am I missing?  Also I wonder what's the right way to add an
extention to a build under Windows/Visual C-8.

And thanks, in advance, to everyone for their help.

Josh Scholar